On Sunday, we checked out a couple of exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at courtly life in Europe during the Renaissance and the end of the Middle Ages. One exhibit was on the armor and stuff from the era of Maxmillian I. The other was on all the gadgets and fancy stuff that were in the courts between 1550-1750.

We played a game. Who would you have been back then?

Looking at all the gears and intricate mechanisms in the automatons, we decided that were made by someone like Ian — someone with an instinctive knowledge of machinery, attention to detail, and zero interest in social life. In other words, they were made with someone with an autistic spectrum disorder. He would have thrived in an old workshop. Or in a monastery somewhere, rewriting old manuscripts before the invention of the printing press. There’s no question that half those old monks were someone like Ian.

Depending on my birth, I would have either been in the kitchens of a castle or deeply involved in castle intrigue, poisoning my husband’s enemies. Steve would have been managing the ledgers and documents for a lord. Jonah, too wiry and thin to wear the pounds of armor, would still have been involved in the military in some way. Maybe as a scout or part of the cavalry.